2008 R2 Version 1 Is a Public Document. Certify That You Conform To It

The original Responsible Recycler Version 1 was a public document. EPA in Washington DC paid a professional mediator, John Lingelbach, to host a series of meetings with environmental stakeholders and experts (myself included) to get a standard that ANAB and ANSI could ok various professional auditors, such as Orion Registrars or Perry Johnson Registrars to certify.

Here is a link to the original R2 V1 document, which is now very difficult to find online. I had to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (and I left them a donation, it's a really cool utility).

Conforming to a public standard is something a small recycling business can do without any legal third party, such as SERI or E-Stewards, taking a financial cut. You cannot claim to be certified BY that third party, and you don't get a certificate with a gold star. But you can pay for the exact same person, the exact same auditor, to come and audit your status as certifyable to your conformance to the 2008 standard. 

The Versioin 2 of the R2 standard arguably made no changes at all to the Version 1 other than make it a non-public, copyrighted standard. And that was more than arguably due to the financial interests of the certification organization that John Lingelbach formed in order to make a living and hire people to "maintain" the standard. And they do "Maintain" it, and ANAB and ANSI may or may not add value that ISO (which you have to also adhere to in order to get R2 certification) doesn't give you anyway.

India Rag Recycling: Not so Shoddy

Taking a break from Africa trip, I reminded myself to USE TWITTER for its intended purpose.

Twitter isn't for writing, and reading every person you follow is about as edifying as reading a library card catalog. Booleans and keyword searches have long replaced the Dewey Decimal System.

Twitter is about the SEARCH box.   So for a break, I typed in "Recycling India".

BAM. BINGO.   A textile recycling city.  Tip of the hat to Tweeter Tim Mitchell of the UK.

http://www.timmitchell.co.uk/index.php?/projects/clothing-recycled/

APOLOGIES - I must redirect you to this site, still strongly recommended.
In place of the India photos I originally posted, I have put in several 60 year old Wikimedia photos of rag-pickers from Western cities.  Do visit Tim Mitchell.

I completely understand that an artist saying "yes" to one person can lose control of the images as they are found by other bloggers.   Fortunately, through Wikimedia Commons, I have managed to find practically the same photos (in black and white) as the activity shown in India, mostly taken in Britain in the 1940s.

Wikimedia commons - "Old rags into new cloth Britain"

At the thrift shop I managed for two years, we sold a lot of bales of used clothing, and found the market dominated by Indians, Pakistanis, and Africans.   My long lost chum Yadji told me about his family making treks to Lagos to buy bales of used clothing to bring back to his Cameroon village of Yenwa.

The Tim Mitchell link shows 28 photos taken at an Indian rag and clothing trade village, which I say defies the labels of "formal" and "informal" sector, terms made up by Western academics and then applied by the Chinese Communist Party to crack down on Taiwanese competitors with CCP owned factories.



The mall photo or Mitchell's (#10) reminds me of the Cairo used Technology Malls.   The 28 photos show several links to different niches and segments.  One is actually the business of buying used India Saris, washing them up, and exporting them to the "hippy markets" in Western countries.

Good Point Recycling is R2 Certified!

[ May 2012, Middlebury, Vermont ]

John, Colin, Pete and Rachael did what was necessary to get our company R2 Certified.  We received our Certificate this week, and it has been registered with R2 Solutions and ANAB.

Who gets the credit?  Not me, that's for sure.  I was travelling to Mexico and South America and Vegas and DC during the past quarter, and sending staff to Nairobi, and negotiating Fair Trade Recycling contracts in Europe and Asia.  While I was off making it more difficult to certify and mass-balance more and more activity, the staff at Good Point Recycling was busy making sure the factory runs, orders are met, material is safely processed, and we do things right.  John and Colin did everything right, and Rachael and Pete made sure the state contract and our clients didn't suffer or stray from the rules John and Colin set.

Me, I just made the job harder.  It's easy to get certified if you refuse console televisions and just take off lease computers and laptops ("no hair on the meat", my pal Joe says).   It's easy if you aren't dealing with 12 countries, and 8 different purchase orders, with different reuse specifications.

Want to get R2 Certified the Easy Way?  Lay off the staff, stop the reuse and exports, don't handle residential material, and buy a shredding machine.  Better yet, don't do it in house - collect the material and send it to someone else's shredder.  The less your company tries to do, the less you must document.

It's easier to get Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) communication if you aren't cross-training women from Mexico, or running a job training program for challenged and disabled people with the local counseling service.  It's easier to certify a few things, than to be a "general practitioner".